I am excited. Excited about the latest Mars landing, excited about all the new technology coming out and excited about my birthday today at the time of this writing :) I may have mentioned it before that there is an old curse (attributed to the Chinese) that goes something like may you live in interesting times.

These "interesting times" are here now and whether they are a curse or a blessing is entirely up to how you look at things. I personally think of these interesting technological times to be a blessing and wish to live on to see even more interesting times. The most interesting times for me would be to be able to commute between planets as easily as we can commute between countries.

As a matter of fact there is one story by Isaac Asimov [edit: I think it from Asimov but I could be wrong] (arguably the greatest story teller of all time) where robots are on another planet and people log in to them, explore the planet via the robot and log out again.

When that story was written there was no technology capable of such a feat. Today is a different story. There are now more than a handful of robots on a different planet where people log in, explore the planet via the robot and then log off. All from the comfort of a chair. Not only that, as in Asimov's story, those robots also have autonomous abilities and can do tasks for themselves.

Unfortunately those lucky, lucky people are not your average geek like me and possibly you :) So when will it be our turn? Those are the "interesting times" I hope to be able to see. I would like to see a time when a Saturday nights entertainment is not lounging on a couch watching dancing with the stars or some such rubbish. I would like to see a time when, through our robot avatars, we are literally dancing among the stars on an alien planet of our choosing. Instead of time share vacation homes we can have time share robots on Mars, Io, Saturn or any other planet.

So how can we get to that situation as quickly as possible? Funnily enough we already have the technological capabilities to do so. All that needs to be done is prepare the hardware and software, send it off, login and hear the crunch of alien pebbles underneath our remote metal boots.

Far fetched you may think? Not so. Take my recent post where I slobbered on about the NAO robot (It's my birthday so somebody send me one as a present....pleeeeeease!! :). This robot is capable of remote control and it can even mimic your movements. There are several models of pedestal type remotely controlled robotic avatars already so why not combine the avatar software with humanoid robot and ship it off to another planet? It can be done and I believe it is possible to have some prototype ready in a couple of years easily if we were to really work at it.

What do you think? Is it possible with our current technology? Would you prefer to have a wheeled robot avatar on another planet or a humanoid one which mimics your movement? What sort of problems do you see? How could we solve them? Discuss this in the comments below.

Some name

I've always been fascinated with graphics and wrote my first drawing program on the venerable apple ][e. After discovering the x86 IBM clones and wrangling my way into the computer industry I'm now immersed in work as a Computer Engineer, System Administrator, OS builder (Linux from Scratch and Android) and general techno-head.